The case for more meetings

No that was not a click bait headline.

A typical work day, for me, starts around 8 am wand goes on pretty much through the day, for about 12 hours, with non stop calls. Yes I force myself a break of about an hour spread through the day.

And I am one of the lucky ones. I have colleagues who do far more of this.

Last week I was talking to my colleagues and discussing which of these meetings would go away when we started going to office. Going through our respective calendars it looked like every one of these meetings would continue when we went back. Very strange indeed. A lot of the meetings I have in my calendar only came in because of working from home. And now it looks like we’d not go back to the ‘less meetings’ days.

Every day I, like many of you, get two kinds of messages.

• Have fewer meetings: The new citi CEO, decreed, no zoom Fridays. We had the ‘You Hour’ in my office. Many companies are creating their version of cutting back on meetings. Some following the citi example. Some saying meetings will be shorter. Our way to overcome video conference fatigue.

• Have more focused meetings: There’s lots of material on how to make meetings more productive. Send pre read material. No power points. agile stand ups. Everyone is sending around reading on how other people run their meetings. The essence of it is: be focussed. discuss actions and get out.

I am sort of not entirely bought into these very well intentioned and sensible suggestions.

Let me tell you why.

Imagine you were calling your credit card company about a transaction. Your conversation is very focused. You need your information and you’re out. That’s a very productive meeting. It’s done it’s job and you’re moving on to your next task.

Now imagine you need your friend to do you a favour. No matter how well you know him, you’re going to have the pre favour chit chat. Put some pennies in the social capital fund. And then ask the favour. You don’t want to be the friend that when the phone rings, the receiver asks ‘wonder what he wants this time’.

If all you want is a transactional relationship with your team, then of course you want to go the way of the credit card company call. Short, sharp, outcome focused meetings. Your meetings will be shorter. You may even get some work done. But the social capital is eroding. You’re probably overdrawn

As a leader, though you are responsible for building team morale, engagement and so on. This is where your meetings come in. The meetings need to get team work done as also strengthen the bonds.

Let’s think back to the days we were in office. What built social capital? It was the casual conversations with your colleagues/managers. Bump into each other in the hall way. Casually walk up to someone’s desk and have a chat. Go for a drink after work. Grab a bite together. And so on.

In this environment, when you have meetings, it makes sense to have them as focussed as possible. The only purpose to get the team together is to discuss a plan and decide on action. Anything else is a waste of time.

And cutting back on meetings makes sense too.

But when you are working from home, the video conference call actually has to serve the purpose of building social capital AND getting work done.

Which is why I am not fully bought into the fewer meetings and more focussed meetings.

We need as many meetings as necessary to create your social fund. And we need the meetings to have an action oriented agenda to it.

This may take the form of ‘ no agenda’ meetings, where team members can hang out and talk about anything they want to. Maybe work, but off the record kind of conversations or non work. Like a movie they saw, or a meal they made or whatever.

Or the first 10 minutes of every meeting is dedicated to pre agenda discussions, like the above.

Either of these two can serve the job of addressing the concerns expressed by CEOs world over.

The Infosys CEO said remote working has worked for Infosys because years of working together in office environment has built up social capital over the years.

Sathya Nadella said: “One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”

I have seen a few other leaders express similar sentiments.

Before we go blindly cutting meetings and doing the tight action agenda meetings think of the investment you have to make to build a high performing, highly engaged team.

Backing me up is this fast company research: https://www.fastcompany.com/90579969/no-one-is-talking-about-the-real-problem-with-working-from-home

Excerpts below:

In August 2020, a fast company partner surveyed 2,300 executives and employees who were abruptly thrust from the workplace by COVID-19. While a predictable majority (54% of executives and 43% of nonexecutives) reported cultural strain and deterioration since dispersing, we were repeatedly fascinated by reports of teams that felt closer and more productive than before. Surprisingly, a large minority of employees report they are working together better since their forced separation

We were encouraged to find that almost every intervention leaders used had a positive effect on social capital. Some had a greater effect than others, but most everything produced something. Healthy organizations were those where leaders worked actively to build social capital. When they did, employees were:

• 60% more likely to respond quickly to requests from each other.
• Almost three times more likely to give one another the benefit of the doubt when problems occurred.
• Almost three times more likely to sacrifice their own needs to serve a larger team goal.
• More than twice as likely to take initiative to solve problems rather than waiting to be told to do so.

Leaders in healthy organizations went beyond the obvious interventions like offering flextime and were far more likely to use:

• Fun, off-the-wall virtual events (virtual dance parties, online eating contests, etc.).
• More frequent team meetings.
• Scheduled nonwork-related meetings for team members to connect.

Look at the last two recommendations. More meetings. A

Philosophically, having fewer meetings and ensuring those that you have drive action is absolutely right. Do be mindful that, you are keeping time to make deposits in your social capital fund.

Making Silver Years, Golden

A few years ago my 80+ year old father had a fall and like many people his age didn’t fully recover and eventually succumbed a few months ago.

Over the 5 years my mother and father were thrown in the situation I had a first hand experience of the daily, non medical, challenges they faced.

As often happens, when you experience something, you find many people who are going through the same thing as you, and I found most people have faced the same things.

Typically the parents 75+ live by themselves with children nearby or in the worst case overseas. Even in those few cases that parents live with their children they seek to be self sufficient. And the tsunami of technology is overwhelming.

I believe these 5 things can make their lives more comfortable.

1. Big screen phones: Smartphones are getting smaller (and smarter). Their inflexible fingers struggle with the small icons and keyboards. We either need someone to produce bigger screen phones or an app that magnifies what is on the screen. I think the former with limited preloaded apps is the need of the hour.
2. Offline support: Given lack of trust in technology and the need to see people face to face, most parents want to go the bank to update their passbook. Or go to the store to buy vegetables and groceries. For many this is their only going out. The challenge here is having reliable transport. Own drivers are seen as excessive as they don’t go out a lot. Reliance on autos and taxis puts them at the mercy of premium rates. If there was a taxi service that catered to this group, that would be wonderful. Driven by respectful drivers. Door to door pick up and drop. If need be hand hold them to the bank/store and back. Maybe a sub brand of Uber/Ola or a totally new service.
3. Online help: Some parents are slowly adopting online services like banking. But there are many nuances that escape them. From the monthly changing passwords to software updates to online payments, these always prove to be hurdles and embarrassing to ask someone. A highly reliable, authenticated operation using as simple a thing as teamviewer can fix nearly all of these problems. Remote logins and changes are very easy to do, if there’s a trusted person at the other end. This should be easy to achieve with aadhar.
4. Financial advice: Where do most parents invest their money? FDs. Safety is their primary concern. And of course going with what they know best. Government bank is safe, is the over riding belief. Here again, if someone reliable in a relatable age bracket ie 55+ is able to walk them through step by step on the benefits of looking after their money and helping it grow they would grab it. Currently they are depending on their own wits or on some young guy trying to make a commission and thereby losing money.

While 1 above is a hardware intervention, 2, 3 and 4 require human intervention. In fact the same organisation can offer all three.

And where do we find people. There is a whole lot of people who get retired between 55 and 60. Smart people. Don’t really need the money, but would benefit from some income. And would see this as a kind of ‘give back’.

How does it get funded? A pay as you go or a subscription model. Paid for by the children who don’t have the time or capacity to deal with all the needs of their parents.

I want to be clear here that this is not a medical support service. There are many very good organisations like nightingales, Portea who do this already. This is for everything else.

I am sure more services can be added over time but for an MVP this would be good.

Can?

Leadership and Adversity

There is no question that these are astonishing times. Hundreds are being felled by a virus that is jumping borders and age groups effortlessly. Rules to live and work are being rewritten nearly daily. People are panicking and looking around for someone to be a calming hand and show some sense of direction.

A great time for leaders to come forward, or be noticed.

In the recent past I have been talking to some of my friends in other companies and catching up on how they, or their companies, have been dealing with this new normal.

3 types of leadership styles seem to have emerged:

ABSENCE: Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of leaders in this area. This is more acute in global companies where the local leaders have just gone into hiding and made the decision that it is adequate for their global leaders to communicate. I don’t understand this behaviour. People are part of global companies but more that of their local outfit. Their managers, leaders, customers, environment, challenges are all local. So, they expect their local leader to communicate.

ARTIFICIAL: This category (actually there are 2 sub categories) of leaders largely believe if we just treat it as Business As Usual, then we can distract employees from the concerns on their mind. So typically calls, emails will make a reference to the work from home situation or that ‘these are unusual times’ and then on to the matter at hand. Here are our priorities, our goals and you have 2 days to do X or Y. Within this there is the other group of leaders who have clearly got instructions from the corporate office to ‘establish connect with the employees’. In both these groups of people this does not come naturally and it shows in their body language. People see through this quite quickly and this affects their response to the leader’s messages.

NATURAL: If there is an artificial leader there has to be a natural leader. She is the one who is proactively reaching out to teams, continuously communicating to them, offering assistance, asking them what they are going through and so on. Yes there is work to be done, but her primary motivation is calming the team. She knows if you relieve the teams from their stresses, you can get work done. And interestingly many of these are not leaders in the organisational definition of leadership. These are everyday people who instinctively understand that there are time of adversity when certain things need to be done and go out and do it. They don’t wait for instructions or guidance from worldwide. Around us everyday, last week, we have seen examples of this. The latest one I saw yesterday was this person who started this group online called care mongers ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/caremongersindia/?multi_permalinks=208978560210233&notif_id=1584797510143320&notif_t=group_highlights) This groups is offering pick up and delivery services to the elderly who are unable to do much work due to absence of house help. I do hope HR departments and organisation decision makers are noticing these people and fast tracking them for leadership roles through development programs. These are the people you need, to lead the teams through a demonstration of High EQ.

If you are a leader and you are in the absent category, anything you do will get you out of that purgatory. Send one email to all your staff just wishing them well, and that your company is actively engaged in their welfare etc etc. Sounds fake I know, but it is probably better than being absent.

If you are in the ARTIFICIAL category, my only question is Why? We are all natural as human beings. So, let’s rediscover that humanity. When there is anxiety, people only need small signs of assurance and confidence. The bar, actually, is really low.

These unprecedented times causes tremendous anxiety in our teams. One of the most common symptoms of an anxiety disorder is excessive worrying. And when the teams are worried you can bet that their work is impacted big time.

A few examples from the political world that have been quoted in recent times are this speech by Lee Hsien Loong, the Prime Minister of Singapore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaoVg6ejgRQ and the daily press conference held by Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3h9Z4u4icM.

Pretty simple right? Just letting people know what is going, what to expect and what you are doing is really all that is needed.

Adversity is a great time to establish (or damage) your leadership credentials. So what are you going to do today?

If I can help let me know.

Career Planning : Some thoughts

Frequently over the years people have sought my advice to build their career. As more people have come to talk to me and even taken notes as I speak I imagine I have been helpful.  I am therefore taking this opportunity to share here what I have been telling them, in the hope that it may come useful to more people. And more importantly, others can contribute to his discussion for everyone’s benefit.

One of the greatest problems besieging talent in companies is the company philosophy that ‘your career is in your hands’. My wife does not trust me with a glass, for fear that I will some how break it. And I have a super track record that she can quote off the back of her hand. These same hands are responsible for my career? You can see why that does not inspire much confidence to me. I think many employees in many companies feel the same way.

To add to this employees are asked to talk to their manager. Those same managers who already have their hands full with their careers now have to advise others. I know many great managers but the average manager is just not super equipped to handle career conversations with his employees.

To make this interaction useful she dons the role of a psychotherapist and deals in question. The first one being: ‘So what do you want to do?’. This is really not very helpful is it? Psychologists are experts in asking questions to get to the root of whatever is the issue bothering you. They seldom ask direct questions. Their questions are meant to help you introspect. ‘So what do you want to do?’ is not one of them. I know folks who have been working for 30 years and still don’t know what to do. And it seems it is a fairly common epidemic among many of my peers. So we all quote Steve Jobs’ famous commencement speech where he talks about using your collective experience over time and ‘joining the dots’.

I did that and got some nice drawings as below.

Not very helpful, is it?

So I came up with my own plan that I use to advise family and friends who seek me out.

I can bunch the people who I have spoken to into 3 categories:

• Locked and Loaded

Of all the people I have spoken to, only one young lady was extremely clear what she wanted to do. She had a specific role in our company that she wanted. She knew what she needed to do, to get there and was willing to go out and do it. 3 months later she quit and joined another company (because they were willing to move her out of India), completely off what she wanted to do.

• Unlocked and Loaded

There are a bunch of people who sort of know what kind of job they’d like to do. Not a definite job per se but a direction. For example: I want to head marketing for a cattle feed company. I want to be a lullaby maker. I want to start up an online bank. I want to be a small dog walker. I want to head procurement and make people cry Etc etc.

This is a good start. There is a sort of destination in mind. If you are in this category then you need to look at these 3 things in that order.

1. Skills: What are the skills needed to do that job? Do you have them? If not are you able to go and get it? For instance if you want to be a cab driver, you need to know to drive, honk, read maps, talk while you drive and honk again. If you want to be a banker you need to know how banks work, be interested in money, learn to deal with envious non banking batch mates and so on.
2. Experience: With the skills you have gained, you need to gather relevant experience. This can be on the job. As an internship. As a project. Social media posts. Panel discussion etc. The idea is that people need to see you as a professional in your target areas. I mean if you have been a cook all your life and now want to be an electrician you need to be able to show that you have changed a few bulbs, blown a few fuses, replaced some wires etc.
3. Network: This doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Who are the people who will make, or influence, the decision to get you to your destination? When people want to make any decision they ask around. You want to make sure that the people that get asked are aware of you basis #1 and #2 above. Depending on what you want to do, this network will vary. Today thanks to Social Media it is relatively easy to connect with people and start creating the right impression

• Unlocked and Unloaded

Now we come to the next group of people. People who don’t know what they want to do. Or rather they do, but not able to articulate it. To them I recommend these 3 things:

1. Good at: List out what you are good at? Writing? Math? Shooting? Analytics? Trekking? Whatever. Of course you don’t want to list everything you CAN do, rather shortlist what you believe you are definitely recognizably above par.
2. Like to: Now make a separate list of things you like to do. Legal things please. Watch TV? Writing? Helping old people? Sleeping? Teaching? And so on.
3. Demand: What is there a demand for out there? Look at job ads. Read articles that talk about trends, talk to head hunters or other professionals and so on.

Now if you plot these in three circles like a Venn Diagram if you are really lucky you may find that there are some things that fall in all these circles. That is a sweet spot. Here is something that you are good at, you enjoy doing and there is a demand. What are you waiting for? Go on hone your skills, get experience and build your network.

But more likely you may have stuff that falls in 2 circles. Now you have a choice to make, depending on your bent of mind.

If you have a big overlap between what you are good at and what you enjoy but there is no demand, can you create demand? This requires an entrepreneurial mindset. People like Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs discovered a latent demand and built it into a mega industry. Can you do that? Do you have the passion, the energy and the risk taking ability to make this happen?

If you like something and there is a demand but you are not good at it, then well the answer is clear isn’t it? Double down and get better. Take a course. Get experience. Job shadow. Etc.

And the last category is where you are good at something, there is a demand but you don’t really like doing it. Well many people start their careers here and then wind their way to one of the categories above. And as many people ‘settle down’ to this reality spending a lifetime of doing something they don’t really care about but have to for any number of reasons.

Either way this framework helps clarify your options and points you in the directions available for you and answer the question ‘ What would you like to do?’

I am not a career planning expert so I am sure there are superior, scientific frameworks out there. When people come to me, this is what I share. So feel free to use, add on or ignore as you see fit.

Good luck in whatever you choose to do in your career.

Should I take that job?

A few weeks ago someone posted this question, online, (and I paraphrase) ‘ someone I know has been offered a job that pays her 5000 less than she is being paid today. Should she take it?’ This resulted in many responses, some for and some against the move.

As I thought about it, I came up with 5 factors to help those looking for ways to construct a framework to help one decide how to take the next step.

The work: What will you actually do? This is, obviously, very important because this is what you will do every hour of every day that you get paid. If you are going to get paid a million dollars and your work is going to be cleaning blood stains from crime scenes you are going to be neck deep in solvents, cleaning material and visiting odd places. As you can see, therefore, it is vital that you find out as much as you can about the actual work and see if it is something you can do. And even if you can do it will you enjoy doing it? If you are signing up to be an analyst there will be numbers and xl sheets involved. Whereas if your job will be in content, you will need to be able to write words that others will want to read. Will you enjoy it? Don’t get swayed by grand sounding words like strategy, paradigm, innovation and so on. While those are surely what the company does, it may be done only by the folks on the 32^nd floor and not by you on the 11^th.  Atleast on day 1. Dig into the specifics of your day to day activity and gauge for yourself, your ability and level of comfort.

The money: How much will you get paid? Usually deals get made or broken over the compensation. When all is said and done, the bank balance at the start of every month should make you happy. Before talking money to anyone, do some research on what someone with your expertise and experience should be getting paid. Be mindful of the context of the compensation. Talking on the phone would be a highly valued skill in a call centre and you could get paid well for it, not as much in a massage parlour. So depending on where you are applying for the job the compensation would vary. You may prefer the massage parlour for any number of reasons (which I would be keen to know) but then be aware that it will only pay what they value the job at. Then it is entirely possible that you have done all your homework but the money being offered is not where you’d like it to be. If the other factors mentioned here are good, then your decision may be that the lower compensation is an investment you are making in yourself that will help you grow so that when you cash that investment somewhere else, or later in time in the same place, the returns will be worth it.

The company: Which company will you work at? You may be doing great work and being paid well for it as well, but if it is not a great company then is the work that you will be doing, the primary activity of that company? For a fashion designer Hermes is a great place to work. Not so much for a chef. Of course every company will have need for more generic professionals like marketing, sales IT, finance and so on but an IT person at IBM would have a significantly different experience from being an IT guy in an advertising agency. Based on your experience and the job shortlist the company you’d like to work in. Next.. is the culture one where they eat their young ones? Or their old ones? Or neither. Some companies thrive on internal competition others focus on collaboration and team building. Depending on the kind of person you are, you may prefer one over the other. How about training? Does the company train and grow its employees or is it sink or swim? And probably another important aspect to be aware of would be the company reputation, among your own friends and family. We all have some shallow friends and ignorant family members but who have a wide social network. You want to make the right impression with them. Sort of the difference between working at Acme sanitary ware and Unilever Domestic Care .

The industry: So it’s good work, good pay in a good company. But what about the industry you will be working in? Sometimes there could be issues to do with ethics and morality like say tobacco companies. Of course given the way the world is moving, more industries like automotive, fuel, plastic, finance and a whole bunch of others are being viewed with suspicion as well. There are some industries that are in decline like coal, steel, kindness and so on. Some industries are booming like wind, solar, social media, hacking. Some are solid but dull like fertilisers, shoes, insurance. You want to be in an industry that has a good future. While predicting what will be around for a generation is a tough task, it is important that you keep this in mind while deciding your job move.

The location: And finally something we don’t consciously look at but is at the back of our minds. Where do you have to go to work every day? Is it going to be a 2 hour commute to a tech park with no parking? Is it going to have you relocate to a village with no running water? Is it going to be in a glitzy building with a view of the mountains, or the ocean? While some of us would want to be able to walk to work, some may want the distance to day dream. Some jobs are necessarily tied to some locations. Like some jobs can only be performed in factories. Others may only be done in the front office. So think about the location when you are deciding your job.

So those are my 5 factors to help you guide your next move. It will be a rare occasion that you will get something that ticks all the boxes. Some level of optimization will be needed to help you decide. Maybe what you could look at is creating a scale from 1 – 5 for each of these factors and rank against each for the opportunity (or opportunities) you are evaluating.

This could help you to get to a rational approach to deciding whether that 5000 drop is a good move.

 

Good luck.

Let’s count everything

This is a great chapter from Dave Trott’s book: Predatory Thinking

Never mind the quality, feel the width

My first job in advertising in London was at BMP in Paddington.

We had a lovely old delivery-van driver called George.

George was a little, tubby, bald cockney with a gravelly voice.

He was always wheeling and dealing, always had slightly dodgy merchandise to sell.

One day George came round the creative department looking for me.

He said, ‘’Ere, Dave, you like books, don’t cha?’

I said I did.

He said, ‘I’ve got some big books in the van, d’you wanna buy ’em?’

I said it depended who they were by.

George said, ‘I don’t know nuffink abaht that. But they’re three or four inches thick, abaht a foot wide, and two foot long. They ain’t half big. D’you wanna buy ’em?’

At the time it seemed odd to me.

Did George really think size was the first consideration in buying a book?

Did he imagine bookshops were divided into two sections?

‘Big Books’ and ‘Little Books’.

If you like books a lot you go in the ‘Big Books’ section.

If you don’t like books much you go in the ‘Little Books’ section.

That seems silly to us.

But hang on.

If it’s so silly, how come we do our jobs that way then?

When I talk to people from different ad agencies all over London, they’re constantly filling in timesheets.

To work out how long they spent on a particular job. Not how good or bad the work was, you notice.

Just how long they spent.

Agencies work out how much of their staff’s time the client can afford.

Then allocate people accordingly.

I hear it all over town.

‘We can’t afford a senior planner on this, we can only afford a junior.’

‘The art director can only have half a day on this, we’re already over budget.’

‘The copywriter can’t rewrite the copy, we’ve spent all the hours.’

And the bookkeeping takes over.

Is that mad or what?

Einstein said, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’

But we haven’t remembered that.

Quite the opposite.

Counting has taken over from what counts.

And we’ve forgotten the first rule of advertising.

It doesn’t matter what went into it.

What matters is what people get out of it.

Imagine if we judged everything else this way.

Films:

‘No, I don’t want to see that film, it’s only 97 minutes long.

This one is 122 minutes long, that’s a much better film.’

Restaurants:

‘Waiter, can I see a menu with information next to each dish about how long it took the farmer to grow the vegetables, and what the chef’s hourly rate is?’

Art:

‘I don’t want to go to the Louvre, the Mona Lisa is only 18 inches square. They’ve got much bigger paintings hanging on the railings outside Hyde Park, let’s go there.’

If we’re looking for a way to judge value for money, we’re using the wrong criteria.

In any other area of life we judge on quality.

How good something is.

It seems in advertising now we can only judge on quantity.

How much do we get?

We’re doing our jobs the way George sold books.

Are you chasing the right goals?

If you are at any social gathering in Bangalore, it wouldn’t be more than 3 minutes before the conversation turns to the city’s crazy traffic situation.

You can take an hour to traverse 10 kilometres.

The reasons are a few and in no order of priority they are

1. High vehicle density: As more people enter the middle class, vehicle ownership is a matter of pride.
2. No public transport: Metro is a nascent project and doesn’t really go where most of the people want to eg IT Parks/airport
3. Uber/Ola: Arrival of these drive share apps has created a large new business opportunity for many people, adding more vehicles on the road.
4. Poor condition of the roads
5. Disobeying traffic laws: You will find people driving the wrong way, parked on busy roads etc

 

The Traffic cops have no control on items 1 – 4. But 5 they definitely can. So they are extremely aggressive on that, by focusing on.. 2 wheeler riders not wearing helmets and loud vehicle horns! Yes that is where they focus all their attention.

Result: Traffic jams continue unabated. In fact get worse, because now you have to also deal with the above offenders stopped by the cops.

If you run a restaurant and customers are not happy with the food, changing the logo is not the answer.

Also, gone are the days, you had to make wild guesses at the reason for a specific problem.

With the advent of digital communications, there is now a volume of data out there that helps you reduce, if not eliminate, guesswork from your marketing. Even if brands don’t advertise on-line, the consumers are already there spending time, asking, engaging, discovering, interacting and so on.

Parsing this information will tell you if you are talking to the right audience, about the right problem/opportunity at the right time with the right solution.

You can never over invest in a good listening strategy linked to a planning and optimisation one.Know what your customers want and what their ‘pain points’ are. Then appropriately craft your communications.

This is the ONLY way to ensure that marketers are aligned to helping consumers meet her own goals.

And that is the express way to ride the autobahn to customer loyalty.

Living in silos

These days it is impossible to be in any marketing (or indeed business) related conversation where the phrase ‘big data’ does not show up. Where there is big data, its best friends ‘Analytics’ and ‘Cloud’ are not far behind.

And of course with Internet Of Things we read about the Intelligent Elevators, Intelligent Containers,  Brilliant Janitors and so on.

It will be a wonderful world, some day.

Yet our daily experiences are so far from reality, and I wonder if companies are really ready to take on the transformation needed to survive and win in the new era.

I give a few examples below from last week to illustrate my point.

‘ Dear customer, this is to remind you to pay your insurance premium/telephone bill/ school fees (choose your item) for Rupees XXXXX by November 18, 2017, failing which your service will be cut off. Kindly ignore if already paid’.

We had an issue with airtel last week when they cut off our phone connection as they did not have some documents from us. The previous day we got an SMS asking us to email the documents by end of day. Which we did. So when we called customer service after disconnection and mentioned the email, their response was ‘oh that will take 2-3 days to show in our system’

I took an HDFC insurance policy and they needed an id proof. I got a call from them asking me to send it to their whatsapp number. So ‘modern’ I thought. So I whatsapped the id proof to them. The next day I got an email asking me to submit the same document via upload, email or whatsapp. I did the upload and email as well. I still get an email everyday asking for the same document. While I have also got emails saying they have received the document.

As customers our reactions range from vexed to frustrated.

These companies are leading players in their field. Data is their currency. They are mean to be at the forefront of all the Digital Transformation we read. Yet at a very fundamental level they seem to work in silos. Driven by the data that sits in silos. Clearly there is a ‘marketing database’ and a ‘customer database’ and probably a  ‘commercial’ database which sits separately and, I imagine, there is some sort of weekly synch that runs across them all. But in the interim period it is all mayhem.

On the other hand my experience with amazon has been quite opposite. You call them, or chat with them, and they have immediate access to every email every chat, or call you have had with them, in addition to your financial relationship with them. This always makes for a very productive conversations.

Ginny Rometty, the Chairman, President and CEO, of IBM says often ‘data is the new natural resource’. Earlier this year The Economist carried a cover story on the same theme.

Extending the oil analogy for a minute, obviously the bigger and deeper the well, the more profitable it is to drill. The analogy with data breaks because, I don’t think, there is yet a way to bring together several small wells together to make one big well. But with data it is possible.

Rather than have data sitting in different silos, bringing it together, with appropriate security, ensures that the teams all have the same view of the customer, or indeed the business, forcing collaboration.

Curiously, if businesses have a single view of the customer, the customer also ends up having a single view of the company they deal with.

And who doesn’t want that?

 

You’re always on duty

Last week, media in India was agog with the manhandling of a passenger on Indigo airlines, a budget carrier in India. For my non Indian readers the quick summary is that a passenger got into an argument with the airline stuff which quickly escalated into a physical altercation and two airlines employees then held the passenger to the ground with the images of one of them, holding him by his neck being the one that went around all the channels.

The airline moved pretty swiftly by taking disciplinary action against the employees. A pretty simple decision, as the staff were on duty and there is a clear manual on how to behave in these situations. A manual that they disregarded.

A few weeks ago Juli Briskman went on a bike ride. As she was out the President’s motorcade passed her by, and for whatever reason, she flipped the bird. Another iconic picture that went around the world. Here it is, once more.

Seeing the picture, Juli spoke to her employers to state that the picture was hers (though the name does not show up anywhere) and shared the picture on her own social media channels. Shortly after, she was fired, for violating the company’s social media policies.

And another episode closer home, a friend’s colleague got into a twitter argument with someone. At some point in time the person she was arguing with, did an on-line search for the employer name and sent a complaint email to the company’s global HQ with screen grabs of the offending chat. As expected, when something like this happens in a global company, an investigation was launched and the employee was called in and strongly advised to rethink his on-line behaviour as it was not aligned with the company’s values. Interestingly, the only place this person’s employer was named was on his Linkedin profile. Not the twitter one.

What this seems to suggest is that the line between personal and professional is blurring. We saw this start with the advent of mobile devices. Email and work calls did not recognise office from personal time. It was all one amorphous mass.

The same seems to be happening with the concept of being ‘on duty’. It appears that one is, slowly, always going to be on duty. The values of the company one works for are going to be expected to be followed in personal time as well. Usually all is fine, but when things go wrong then social media amplifies it tremendously and then the juiciness comes from taking on Goliath. Not the offending individual.

If you get into an argument with someone in a public space, you need to be well aware that when things go South your company’s name is going to feature prominently in any sound bytes about the episode.

Celebrities usually have a morality clause in their contracts, where they can be fired for doing something that affects their personal brand value and thereby impacting the value of the contract.

I imagine most employee contracts have something similar buried in the pages and pages of stuff we sign when we join a new company.

We all carry that implicit expectation from our employers that we don’t act in a way that shows them up poorly, even in a personal capacity.

Not applicable to the Indigo story of course, as they were at work, in uniform.

But when we are out of the work space, or how we interact with people on-line is where we are susceptible to our own morality clauses and where companies will increasingly expect their employees to be brand-true.

 

 

 

The Advertising Agency Challenge

This weekend I was having drinks with a well respected CEO of one of India’s top brands, and after talking about matters of mutual interest, we drifted to talk about advertising agencies.

In fact he started it by referring to a blog of mine where I had compared agencies with other professional services like doctors and consultancies.

What follows are his thoughts/comments:

When I go to a lawyer or a CA or a doctor, with a problem the expectation is that the problem will get solved. With an agency, I get the feeling that the problem is always mine, with the agency wanting an active say without the attendant responsibility.

Law, Medicine etc have codified principles which have SMEs who guide their clients. Does the advertising business have any such learnings that can be leveraged? At an execution level or a consumer behaviour level?

When he was planning a retail expansion, McKinsey was hired to advise them and they were to draw in a bunch of global retail experts including market visits to Europe and the US to learn. In the agency world it looks like the same person works on everything thereby not really having in depth knowledge on any one subject.

The agency business is very Creative Director driven so the agency with the best creative director wins the business. Makes the relationship very ‘campaign’ driven. This prompts clients to look at new Creative Directors every time they think of a new campaign. Hence, loyalty tends to be low.

As the creative business becomes more art and less science, senior management of companies start tuning out of the process, leaving it in the hands of juniors.

The pressures on business are very intense and those that come with greater knowledge and ability to tie in many disparate parts of the business get C-level attention. This is where Consultancies like IBM, Accenture etc tend to win. They start with a conversation around helping companies go digital..this leads to transforming processes and culture..leading to digital touch points..apps etc..and before you know it many aspects of related design get gobbled up by them. The linkage to business is vital.

I am sure none of this is new, but hearing it from an influencer in the industry was rather sobering.

I am pretty sure there is an agency POV, which would be worth hearing to balance this out. But rather than it being about ‘why clients are to blame’ if we are able to get to a situation of how the perception/reality addressed, we may see agencies winning the battle to get CXO share of mind and more budgets.